Everyone in the US and Australia owes $12,000 in CO2 emissions

时间：2019-03-02 07:15:01166网络整理admin

Beholden to the poor? (Image: Richard Casteel/EyeEm/Getty) Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story. IF YOU live in the US or Australia, you owe more than US$12,000. If you’re in the UK, it’s about $4000. These are climate debts, worked out by Damon Matthews at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He sees those who pollute more than their fair share – that is, above the global average – as being in “emissions debt”. Between 1990 and 2013, the US, for example, emitted an excess of 300 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person (Nature Climate Change, doi.org/7jb). That’s about as much as is produced by driving a family car from Los Angeles to New York and back 150 times. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each tonne of CO2 produced today has a social cost of about $40, so the debt per person is $12,000. “It is important to acknowledge and own up to how much we in the developed world have over-contributed to historical climate change,